Doubt less

“Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.”  ~Voltaire, French philosopher and author (1694-1778)

The conversation was not going well at all. The waitress was still refilling our coffee and its effect was making me jittery. “Why don’t you just admit that I’m right?” I was saying. “Because you’re not right,” my friend responded. “You just don’t want to admit I’m right,” I retorted. “Do you want me to admit you’re right, even if I don’t believe you are right?” he fired back.

My friend John liked to refer to himself as a pagan. “If I call myself an atheist, that would mean I have to admit to some higher power in order to dismiss him,” he would say. John’s initial question had been, “Why are you so sure there is a God?” “Why are you so sure there isn’t?” had been my clever response.

This had been the sum and substance of our conversation for the last hour or so. It had started innocently enough over the discussion of whether or not there was a God. 

At first, I had patiently tried all the “pat answers,” suggesting that we see God in nature and that the logic of the universe implied a higher intelligence at work. Finally, I bemoaned the possibility that if mankind were actually the highest authority, our world was really in trouble. 

Try as I might to remain calm, the conversation had quickly turned into a playground spat. Logic had left our table a while ago and now it was just a civilized argument, verbal arm-wrestling.

 “Why can’t you accept that I prefer to live with my doubt rather than accept your beliefs?” John concluded. My response was to ask the waitress for the check.

The great French philosopher and devoted Roman Catholic, Rene Descartes is credited with the statement: “I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am.”  One of the recent criticisms of the church is that we are “doubt-less.”  In other words, the church seems bent on eliminating doubt, rather than helping people process doubt.

Put another way, some people see wrestling with doubt as a good thing. At first blush this seems counter–intuitive.  Isn’t doubt an obstacle to faith?

I suggest that the strength of our faith rests as much on our doubts as it does upon our sureties. When we are sure of ourselves, we stop searching and therefore stop growing. As Descartes observed, doubt makes us think. 

Being in doubt  causes us to continue to process information, rather than discard it when it seems contradictory to what we want to believe.

Doubt opens us to new possibilities and forces us to continue to consider, to search, to look deeper… Shakespeare referred to doubt as the “beginning, not the end, of wisdom.”

Doubt is not the enemy of faith. Rather, it is a necessary ingredient in a strong and resilient faith, a faith that can weather the test of living it.  After all, if everything were assured, clear and without ambiguity, there would be no faith!

To rephrase Shakespeare: Doubt is the beginning of faith, not the end of it.

Dear God: Help me use my doubt to find you in new and deeper ways.

“Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.”  ~Paul Tillich, German born American theologian and philosopher (1886-1965)
©2012 James E. Carper. All rights reserved.
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